Biden's Executive Order and AI Safety with Flo Crivello, Founder of Lindy AI

**Erik Torenberg** (0:00)
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**Flo Crivello** (0:44)
So I was afraid that the regulation would go something like, if you install Microsoft Office in your AI, then you have to make a report. So I went like, it's happening again.

**Erik Torenberg** (0:54)
They're doing it again.

**Flo Crivello** (0:55)
It's like chill. I totally get it. But this time is really different. This is really something special that's happening.
Not just in the markets, not just in the economy, not just in the country, in the universe. There is a new form of life that's being birthed. We're like a new territory and we need to be careful right now. I think if you zoom all the way out, literally from the birth of the universe, the evolution of the universe has been towards greater and greater degrees of self-organization of matter.
You are such a leap compared to an atom or compared to a bacteria, that there is no reason to expect that there wouldn't be another thing above you that is as much more complex or bigger than you as the newer to the bacteria. There's nothing in the universe that forbids that from happening. A being to exist that is about as big as a planet or a galaxy. But I don't expect ASI to take more than 30 years. So I expect that you and I in our lifetime, we're going to see ASI.

**Nathan Labenz** (1:52)
Hello, and welcome to The Cognitive Revolution. Where we interview visionary researchers, entrepreneurs, and builders working on the frontier of artificial intelligence. Each week, we'll explore their revolutionary ideas, and together we'll build a picture of how AI technology will transform work, life, and society in the coming years. I'm Nathan Labenz, joined by my co-host Erik Torenberg. Hello, and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. Today, I'm speaking with Flo Crivello, founder and CEO of Lindy AI, which describes itself as your AI employee, who was first on the show back in March in just our ninth episode.
Flo and his team are still building Lindy AI very actively, and Flo is often posting updates about their performance improvements on Twitter. But for now, the product remains in a super closely held private beta, and to be honest, even I haven't got my hands on it. If you want to hear more about Lindy AI, go back and listen to episode 9 In the meantime, Flo has become increasingly outspoken, always articulately and often very insightfully, on the importance of existential risk management in the context of advanced AI systems. So, with the entire AI community working to make sense of the recent White House executive order and the statements from the AI Safety Summit in the UK, which notably do include some meaningful participation from China. And meanwhile, with the culture war heating up in the background with VC manifestos competing for airtime with cruise shaming and cruise self-flagellation, I wanted to get Flo on the show to discuss the AI safety and regulation landscape from the big picture point of view.
We start with some of the areas where we are both quite enthusiastically accelerationist, before considering whether thinking about AI as a new life form is just another analogy, or perhaps a proper literal description. And then we explain why, on the defining question of our time, the potential development of a general superintelligence, Flo and I are agreed that something like the precautionary principle absolutely makes sense.
As always, if you find value in the show, we'd appreciate it if you'd share it with a friend. Send this one to the techno-optimist libertarian in your life who hasn't properly considered the full potential ramifications of AI. Now, I hope you enjoy this conversation with Flo Crivello.
Man, you know, it's a tough time for somebody that tries to keep up with everything going on in AI. It's like, it's gone from, you know, in 2022, I felt like I could largely keep up and, you know, it wasn't like missing whole major arcs of, you know, important stories. And now I'm like, yeah, I'm like, totally let go of like AI art generation, for example. And this policy stuff is really hard to keep up with, especially this week. Of course, it's like hitting a, you know, fever pitch all at once. But, you know, it's I love it. So I can't really complain at all. It's just at some point, you know, got to admit that I have to maybe narrow scope somehow or just let some things fall off. I'm kind of wrestling with that a little bit.